We Won!

A couple of weeks ago I got a junk e-mail telling me of all the cool contests that the local Fox 13 news station was putting on. One of them had to do with winning tickets to the BYU-Utah football game. Um...yes please!! (If you remember my dilema from last year.....was my heart still RED or was the BLUE secretly coming out?) The contest was a photo contest. Pretty much you enter a picture supporting either BYU or UTAH and have all your friends and family vote for your picture and whoever has the most votes wins. I hate doing things like this because I hate having to ask people to vote. Luckily it was one vote per e-mail address per day and my husband has quite a few different e-mail addresses and I managed to force my family to sign up then give me their log-in info so I could do all the work and no one felt put out. I think there were like 60 different entries and most of them were really stupid and had nothing to do with the theme (someone put a picture of their dog walking down the street, another was a guy with a black hat and black sunglasses, there was even a picture submitted of chewbaca!) I read through all of the rules and regulations beforehand and found out that the voting would only last 1 week and whoever had the most votes by the end of the week would win 2 tickets to the game, $300 gift cards to Best Buy and $150 gift card to Kwal Paint (since it was Kwal Paint that sponsored the contest). The second place prize was $100 Kwal Paint and $200 gift card to Best Buy. Either way those are pretty good prizes. So I entered this picture...

Cute huh? I kept watch for the moment they allowed voting then Daniel and I kept diligently entering our votes every single day. I don't think anyone really gave this contest much notice because of all the entries only about 11 pictures actually had votes on them after the first few days. They eventually narrowed it down to the top 6 pictures and there was really only 1 other person that was even anywhere close to us. We had such a huge lead that I wasn't too worried about not winning until the last day when 2 of the other pictures all of the sudden started getting A LOT of votes. But even their last push for votes wasn't enough to beat Daniel and I and we ended up with 99 votes and the 2nd place winner had 79 votes (I think the 3rd place guy that was keeping pretty close to the 2nd place picture ended up with 66 votes). I was so excited and then I became even more excited when they actually called me and told me where to go to pick up my prize (sometimes you just don't know if it was all a hoax, but this was legit!)

Here's a picture of us after we picked up our prizes. 

I got to pick what we got with our winnings so before the game Daniel and I went over to Best Buy where we picked out a "Nabi" tablet (super kid-friendly/mommy friendly tablet) and a kinect (for our X-Box 360 that Daniel managed to get for free...that's a whole other story!). 

Being 31 weeks pregnant and having sharp pains when I sit down too long on a chair I decided to stay home and watch the game from the comfort of my own bed while Daniel took Johnny and his buddy Brandon to the game.

It was a great game and had one of the craziest endings I have ever seen. Utah ended up winning 24-21 and the boys LOVED being there all in RED cheering on the winners. (Funny that we cheered on Utah even though we won the contest promoting BYU!)

Europe Trip: Rome

*Yes, yes...I realize it's been a year since we went to Europe but I didn't realize how incredibly far behind I am on recounting our incredible journey there. Shame on me! It's important for me to write these things down because I'm already forgetting details about our trip and I don't want to do that. It was so amazing that I want to make sure I remember as much as I can for as long as I can. So I made a promise to myself that I will be better about writing down the things I really don't want to forget later on in life. This trip is one of those things. So here's a continuation of our amazing adventure and I promise I will work on getting the rest of it finished soon.*

When in Rome...

I actually didn't like Rome as much as I thought I would...but I still enjoyed myself. We camped again that night and it took us a long time to find the campground because our GPS was off and the street it told us to take led us into a field! After driving around for a while we found the campsite and picked our spot. It was already getting late so we found something quick to eat and set up camp. The next morning we bought some sandwich supplies and a few snacks to take with us at the little store at the front of the campsite then waited for the shuttle bus. We rode a shuttle to another smaller bus which took us to the train station which then took us into the city. 

It was a very hot day and the city was very crowded. We walked over to Vatican City and tried to make our way through the sea of tour groups inside. It took a very long time to get in but finally we made it inside and started looking around. It was amazing to see so many cool things in person that I've only ever read about in books or seen in the movies. The only problem was it was very crowded, very hot, and the kids were not handling it all that well. Daniel and I ended up getting annoyed with each other and getting into a small fight which caused us to leave a little earlier than we thought. Once we got outside and found some shade to eat our lunch things started to calm down and we made up with each other and kept going with our day.

St. Peter's Basilica was really cool! I had just finished reading Angels and Demons by Dan Brown not long before our trip and kept thinking about the book as we waited in a VERY long line to actually get inside. I was so happy with myself because even though it was a very hot day I still made sure to put on modest clothing. At the front of the line to get in they had workers there that were inspecting everyone's clothes to make sure no one was admitted that wasn't modestly dressed. I kind of felt bad for the people who were turned away after waiting for at least an hour or two in line but I was impressed with their policy and glad I don't wear sleeveless tops or short shorts anyway.


The inside of the basilica was beautiful. I actually liked looking around here more than the Notre Dame Cathedral. Maybe because it wasn't so gloomy or it seemed like there were more things to look at, I don't know but I loved it. Daniel gave me a lesson on what "Crepuscular Rays" are (you know how you see rays of light shinning down in almost a stream onto something? they're really cool looking and give a "holy" sense when you see them).

We filled up our water bottles at the public fountain which made us feel special like we had holy water in our bottles! Then we made our way over to the Hard Rock Cafe to get our pin. It wasn't too far from The Colluseum which we planned on being our last stop because the city was so crazy and it took us forever to get from once place to another.

We got there a bit late because of stupid traffic and trying to figure out where to go so it was already closed for visitors. We ended up just walking around the whole thing then taking a few pictures in front of it while the sun went down. We could see the inside through the gaps in the arches anyway so it wasn't that big of a loss that we didn't get to go inside. We left and caught a bus that took us back to the train station that took us to another bus that took us to our shuttle to get back to our campsite. There was a darling little girl that sat in front of us on  one of the buses (about 3 or 4 years old) that fell in love with John and Josh. She kept calling them "Picollo" and trying to rub Joshua's head. It made the bus ride so fun. We were sad to see her go when we got to our shuttle. 

The next day was Sunday and it took us a little while to find the church building in Rome so we were a little late then we found out that Sacrament meeting was last so we didn't get to attend any other meetings. Oh well, it was still cool to attend church in Rome. We stopped off at a supermarket and bought more sandwich stuff for lunch then started our journey to Venice....

Johnny's first day of school

Aaaahhhh it feels good to be blogging again! Yes, it has been a while since you've heard from me but the way I see it...it's better late than never.

Today is Johnny's first day of school (starting his 2nd year of preschool). As some of you know Johnny has a developmental disorder called PDD (Pervasive Developmental Disorder) that causes a major delay in speech. We could hardly get him to say anything until he was about 3 years and 3 months (a typical timeline with PDD) then all of the sudden he started to progress. It wasn't an overnight "Wow he can talk now!" but the rate that he has been adding words and phrases over the past 8 months has been huge for us. We were lucky to have a great pediatrician who noticed something wrong early on so we could start him on speech therapy. He had speech therapy at our house once a week until he was 3 then he started preschool and continued working with a speech therapist in school. Over the summer we were extremely blessed to trade speech therapy for voice lessons with Johnny's school speech therapist. Her name is Amy and I'm pretty sure John had a huge crush on her :) There is a different speech therapist this year at school so it was nice to still be able to see Amy every once in a while.

Yesterday I went to fill out all of the registration paperwork and let Johnny show Joshua his classroom. They were both so excited to be there.

Johnny with his teacher Emily

Johnny let Joshua roll his backpack around for a few seconds I guess to help him feel included!

Anxiously waiting for the bus to arrive

Sprinting as fast as he can to get on the bus

Poor Joshua feeling a little left out. 

Joshua is pretty sad right now that Johnny is gone. He spilled milk on his shirt this morning and was in the process of changing clothes when the bus came for Johnny. I ran out to take a few pictures and when I came back Joshua had grabbed his Buzz suitcase and was trying to follow his brother out. How do you explain to a 2 year old that worships the ground his brother walks on that he's too young to follow him to school?!